City expansion model based on population diffusion and road growth

In this paper, a city expansion model is proposed to capture the coevolution relationship between population diffusion and road growth. In the model, we adopt the physical diffusion process, which considers the influence of the road network topology and random exploration factor, to analyse the population diffusion based on the cellular automata (CA) model. In addition, the growth mechanism of the road network is developed to minimize the construction cost related to the population density and the Euclidean distance. The distribution complexities of the population density and the road network topology in the evolution process are then analysed. Compared with the real Beijing city in 2012, the suggested model can be used to describe the city evolution process.